Location safety for middle & high school
Your phone tells people where you are. You get to decide who.
You do not have to delete your accounts or be scared of your phone. You just have to know which settings exist and change the few that matter. Most of it takes under ten minutes.
Nothing on this site is saved, tracked, or sent anywhere. No accounts, no cookies, no analytics.
Online enticement reports the CyberTipline received in 2025 — a 158% jump over 2024 (NCMEC).
2025 reports where an offender actually traveled to meet a child in person (NCMEC).
Average financial sextortion reports in 2025, up 37% from the year before (NCMEC).
Of sextortion victims in research cited by the Justice Department were threatened during the very first conversation (DOJ).
The short version
Nobody hacks you. They just read what you already posted.
A jersey. A school parking lot. A story posted while you are still standing there. That is usually the whole investigation.
You do not have to be careless to be findable. Phones share location by default in a dozen small ways, and apps keep renaming the settings that turn it off. The people who misuse that information are not doing anything technical — they are reading public profiles, watching stories, and putting small details together.
The good news is the same thing in reverse. Every one of those leaks has an off switch, and closing four or five of them makes the whole puzzle stop working.
Four things worth doing today
If you only have ten minutes
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Set every account to private.
It is one toggle per app and it removes you from strangers entirely. On Instagram, accounts for people under 18 are already private by default (Instagram Help) — confirm yours actually is.
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Read your live-location list out loud.
Open Snap Map, Find My, Life360, or Google location sharing and look at every name on it. Anyone you would not text right now should come off the list.
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Close DMs from strangers.
In one study of sextortion reports, 65% of children said someone tried to move them into a private conversation on a different platform (Thorn). If strangers cannot message you, that never starts.
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Turn off location for your camera.
Photos can carry hidden GPS coordinates in their EXIF data. Big social apps usually strip it, but files you text, email, or upload directly often keep it (FBI Portland).
If something already happened
You are not in trouble, and it is not your fault.
If someone is threatening you over a photo, pressuring you to meet, or already knows where you live — there is a page for exactly that, with the numbers to call and the two rules that matter most.